by J. I. Radke
God, how easy it was to play this role. One might have thought it was his natural character. Closer, closer—he had to become indispensable to the Earl. He wasn’t sure what drove him to such a goal, other than an obvious shift of power directly into his hands. He had to become a puppet master of sorts.
But all his words felt honest, and Levi wondered if he was getting too much into character.
I feel honored.
The Earl simply smiled a mysterious and distant smile, like the spider in the center of the web smiling over at the fly snared in its silk, lashes lowered on those ruthless pale eyes.
It was rather eerie. It sparked a fleeting misgiving in Levi. He thought—what if the Earl was bluffing too? What if this was all one grand chess game and neither would win because it was an endless dance with danger and dirty design?
But why was he afraid of that, if not only for the obvious loss of strategy? Certainly not because he was enjoying himself—
“I’m the Earl, for Christ’s sake,” the young man had scoffed another night on his balcony—reserved now for kisses in the chilly moonlight—wrapped in secrecy and bed furs. He took Levi’s cigarette for a puff or two and then laughed a cold and entitled laugh, shaking his head. He was a beautiful spoiled brat, wasn’t he?
“I’m the Earl,” he said again. “I’ll sneak around with whomever I please, and no one can stop me! Can’t I enjoy myself now and again? I’ve romped with a few men here and there. Noblemen, hired men, noblemen’s sons…. Listen, I just—I’ve tried to change, Levi. I have, I really have! But I can’t get excited about pretty girls and their powdered cheeks and their tiny little hands. I just can’t.”
“It’s your inclination, and you’re the Earl,” Levi echoed supportively, nodding thoughtfully as he took his Turkish cigarette back. “You can have whomever you please.”
“Emily is to keep up appearances. It sounds merciless, but it’s the truth. And one day, perhaps, I’ll have to get an heir from her, but… what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”
“Ah, rumor is powerful, though, my lord….”
“I much prefer men,” the Earl countered tartly. “As you seem to, as well. Unless it’s just another one of your ‘I’ll be your whatever you want’ tricks. You’re about as bad as a whore, you know that?”
“I love to read,” Levi confessed. “I particularly enjoy darker fiction and the writings of Goethe and Paracelsus.”
“Paracelsus,” the Earl confirmed with a note of skepticism.
“And Aristotle,” Levi added, smiling that damnable smile of his. But it felt sort of sad, so he shook it off. “And, I suppose, former acquaintances and employers saw me as soft because of such. My appetite for reading, that is.”
“What do you think of love, Levi?” the Earl detoured, and it sounded like he was testing Levi again.
Levi’s brow knotted. He smirked bitterly. He said, “Love is just another contract. A promise to devote your life to someone by their conditions. Love is monstrous. I’ve been in love twice, and twice alone. What about you?”
“Oh, you’re as philosophical as a writer,” the Earl complained wryly. “Maybe that should have been your chosen profession.”
“Ah.” Levi held up a finger. “But there’s the catch, my lord. The key word is chosen.”
“I don’t believe in love at all,” the Earl whispered, peering down his nose at Levi. “Love is a lie. We’re all animals, and we submit to our instincts. We travel together, nest together, eat together, fight together, and breed together. And those of us who can’t breed, well….” He blushed, smiling tartly. “Well, we still try. And we get the most enjoyment out of the lack of love in the world, now don’t we?”
Levi laughed. The Earl smiled at him gratefully, like he was happy Levi agreed with him.
“Twice I’ve loved,” Levi said again, boldly, but in a flat voice. “And twice that love destroyed me. Just another contract in a world where you find a cause and you serve it until it crushes your force of will—”
“So you’ve said.”
The Earl cast another dark sultry glance at him, a simple flick of the lashes. Levi hated him for how much he loved it.
“Good, then,” the Earl whispered. “Don’t love me. It’s not what I’m paying you for, anyway.”
It was obvious that the Earl’s self-worth and moral compass were deeply flawed, and Levi reveled in it. There was no judgment on his part.
It was from an objective sort of view that he enjoyed it all, really. Like a rook, watching from the rooftops. The Earl didn’t know who he was fooling around with. That was the worst part, because Levi knew almost everything. The tragedy of the Earl’s parents’ slaughter, the feud between the families, the Earl’s torture after being dumped into the hands of that joke Oberon and Father Kelvin, his raging and brutal thirst for revenge, while across New London, his enemy Lord Ruslaniv was growing so weary of the fighting….
All these things and their deep injustice kept Levi rapt in that sick, curious way of the aftermath. Like the way he stared at the bodies as they were taken away after a shoot-out, or the way the blood was washed off the cobblestones by boys paid to do it like they paid them to exterminate the rats in the worst parts of the city, bucket after bucket and splash after splash. Like the way he stared at his mother when his mother went off on any of her many heartbroken tangents about Quinton, and the past, and why couldn’t things be like the past again?
“Why do you insist on sneaking around like this?”
“Are you an idiot?” The Earl looked at him like he really thought he was just that. “If they knew—if anyone knew—these types of things are not meant to be discussed in the daylight.”
“But there’s something else to it. There’s something rebellious in you, rebellious against yourself, I think.”
“Oh, so poetic, aren’t you?” The Earl iced the words out, and there was a flat note of sarcasm in his voice. “Why must you bring it up? I’m just so tortured, I want to forget who I am before the sun rises and I’m forced to remember, that’s all. You’re so right, Levi.”
The sarcasm fell away and the Earl turned a solemn gaze over to Levi, a little dimple between his brow like his pretense was faltering. Just a bit. Just enough to prove some sort of vulnerability in there beyond his rotten Machiavellian self-importance.
“Maybe,” he whispered, “I’m just a normal man under all these curses, and I just want what I want and won’t stop until I get it.”
Oh God, was that stunning. The confession and the ghost of the frown, and the embittered pride at such an admission. Levi couldn’t help it. There was that indifferent lust again, hot and ready. His clothes felt too tight. He fought the urge to rock forward. Instead he cornered the Earl in against the vines that hung down against the stone of his balcony, and with only the gargoyle as witness, Levi kissed him like he hadn’t kissed anyone in a long time. Hard, and hungry, and impatient, holding his chin in place with one hand, and the Earl growled at him when the kisses bruised, so Levi let up a bit—but then the Earl’s hands shot to the front of his trousers, and Levi yielded because it had been so long since he’d actually wanted to be touched. It was one thing to let himself be teased and pleased for a night’s payment, but to be aroused for free….
“My lord—” he whispered, in a jagged and impatient way, because playing the lower class did get tiring after a while. The Earl covered his mouth with his hand roughly.
The Earl kissed his ear, such tantalizing heat in the cold of a brisk autumn night, and he whispered there in the most casual and uncaring way, “Call me Cain, for Christ’s sake.”
And Levi rather liked it.
SCENE FIVE
NOVEMBER TRUDGED on toward December.
Like a little town of clockwork, every piece playing its rusty part, the city moved. Neighborhoods pulsed with the rattling, sauntering life of the cheesemongers and shop owners and milkmen meeting maids at back doors. In the blushing glow of sunrise, it was the same colorless, depres
sed, and mechanical routine. Gangs roamed the streets they’d claimed—dangerous ones and petty ones, and gangs of thieves and gangs of chimney sweeps. And the rich and elegant wallowed in their luxury, cursing the soggy weather for ruining their good fashion.
The office of the Dietrich house was flooded by business. There were annual agreements to sign, and leases to renew, and accounting to be finalized, and balls to be planned, and financial obligations to the Queen, and donations to be made to charities that reflected best on the family. The Dietrich protective services worked tirelessly, as they always had, to satisfy their young earl’s demands when it came to patrolling the streets and combating the Ruslanivs. And with his slick street man Levi, Cain felt he was prevailing.
“I see you’ve made a new friend,” Uncle Bradley commented under his breath one afternoon, when the sun peeked through the autumn clouds and he’d cracked a tall window open as he puffed on his pipe. Cain blushed and shrugged and nodded at the same time, glaring at his uncle in an admittedly childish fashion.
What was he supposed to say to that? It wasn’t as if he had been keeping Levi a great secret. Weston knew what it meant when Cain said to him, “Don’t knock after ten o’clock tonight,” and what else were the guards supposed to think when their aloof master declared, “I have a visitor coming tonight. Don’t shoot him.”
“He’s an unaffiliated gunslinger,” Cain explained. “I can invite him to dinner if you’d like to meet him, but I’m trying to keep our house and the streets separated. You can only imagine why.”
Uncle Bradley snorted in disdain. “I’m afraid of what it is—that you’re using him as a pawn of yours to get him in bed, or getting him in bed to manipulate him as your pawn. And I’m not sure which is worse.”
Secretly, Cain was galvanized by such accusations. But he promised his uncle there was nothing to worry about, and then his uncle just shook his head as if to say, What am I to do with you, my outrageous little nephew?
Aunt Ophelia and Uncle Bradley both had the unfortunate gift of being able to read him like an open book, Cain had found over the last few years. He couldn’t go a single night having a little bit of fun without waking up the next day to their knowing stares, dry smiles, and suggestive looks with brows risen. Was it wrong to feel so giddy, being bad and not speaking of it with those who knew? No, perhaps it was only the way he was.
Aunt Ophelia had just known when he’d slept with Lord Arnaudet’s son, and that dark-eyed violinist from a Christmas ball a year or so ago, and the handful of insignificant others whom he’d shared his bed with for the night and then tossed out the next morning. She’d sat him down at breakfast the next morning and shook her head at him, shameless and wanton as he was, wandering about with love bites on his throat.
“I understand you’re a young man and your sensuality is something novel and great to you, but your life is not one grand pursuit of pleasure. You have responsibilities and obligations. And secrets have a way of getting out whether you want them to or not.”
“It’s not that,” Cain had replied, casually picking at a scone. He’d been just shy of eighteen then, and like she’d said, distinctly aware of his own virile charm. “They mean nothing to me but a good time.”
“You have a fiancée,” his aunt had reminded.
“I’ll sleep with whomever I please,” Cain had argued. He’d been indignant and impertinent. It wasn’t like he was a man on the prowl; he had a type, anyway. It was just that some nights, at some party or another, he drank a little more than his tiny body could handle, and he found himself chasing after someone, desperate for the final embrace that would make him feel accomplished and triumphant.
He could name his one-night flames on a hand and a half, anyway, each and every one of them from the last two years. There was Jasper, the dark-eyed violinist, who played like he’d sold his soul to the devil and made eyes at Cain from across the room more brazenly than Cain made eyes at him.
There was the Honourable Clem Arnaudet, and Julian Wellseley, who had probably been even more intoxicated than Cain the night they’d tangled together in the shadows of some Old Chelsea flat while a charity function had spun on into the night on the floor below.
There was Theo de Claire, who had wooed Cain for about a week in the code that men wooed men, before Cain had rolled his eyes and told him to get lost, satisfied with the revelation that Theo wasn’t going to peak beyond the first night Cain had given in. The sex was the same and there was nothing exciting about that.
There’d been starry-eyed Reuben, who had given Cain flowers the morning after, and rugged, handsome Nicolo, who was a dancer, and there’d also been that rampsman Zane, who had made Cain feel like a stumbling little boy with a crush again, and Emily’s cousin Oscar, who had gone down on his knees and smirked up at Cain like he knew this secret was just another part of the vast, unspoken, tangled and tattered web of secrets men held together.
All those little flames were disposable, and disposed of they’d been.
Ah, he was unforgivable. He knew that.
He also knew that if he’d been asked two weeks before, or two months, or certainly two years, just what he foresaw of his life, he would have readily replied, “I’ll be alone, of course, because we’re only ever alone in the end.” And he would have believed it, and been utterly content with it.
But something about Levi was different, very different.
When was the last time he’d felt this way? Excited, and invigorated, and alive. Like there was something to look forward to, something worth the risk of the secret-keeping. Was it with Zane? But still, Zane had left an aftertaste in his mouth of self-hatred and fragility, the way Zane had played with his feelings and tried to reach into the pocket of the nobleman as he did so. Or was it with Clem, Lord Arnaudet’s middle son, because that had been a grand game of Avoid the Servants and Lie to the Grown-ups and Laugh Too Hard When You’re Red-Faced and Drunk, Because Clearly They Know Why You’re Running Around the Manor Together But Won’t Speak It Aloud.
The truth was that Cain couldn’t remember the last time he’d looked forward to someone else’s company so much, and he hated that it was so because he didn’t know what to do with it.
Levi had slipped in through some chance crack in his carefully tended façade, invading the secret self that hid there.
It astonished him—and left him feeling rather weak and shy, staring at his paperwork and blushing alone with himself and his thoughts in his office at high tea—that he actually really wanted Levi to be his nighttime romp forever.
Picturing a future where he was married and content with the world seemed bleak and purposeless without Levi. Because Levi didn’t judge him, and Levi saw right through him. Levi didn’t condemn him. He listened to his angriest words and talked sense back into him. He didn’t look at him in that quiet way as if to say, You’re severely damaged, but I can’t point out just precisely how because you’re the Earl. Levi made him laugh, real laughter that hurt Cain’s sides and left him breathless. Levi made him smile, and without thinking about it. Levi made him feel peaceful in the dark of St. Vincent’s and on his balcony, and Levi was on his mind even in the daylight.
Levi was like a friend. Cain didn’t want to get rid of him, ever. And that was a strange and unfamiliar longing that sank its claws into him and wouldn’t let go.
“You won’t want me in ten years, when I’m older and bitter and worse for the wear,” Cain assumed, sitting with Levi outside his room and watching the sky change colors over New London as the sunrise struggled to shake off the blanket of night.
Levi uttered a little sympathetic sigh. “You won’t love me when I’m no longer young and beautiful either,” he argued, and it was the perfect moment for his confession, so Cain craned in, whispering along Levi’s lower lip:
“Yes…. Levi, yes, I want you to be my dirty secret forever. I want to whisper your name to the priest day after day. That is, if I still saw the priest. I want it to be your name on my lips when I fall
asleep at night and when I wake in the morning.”
He was a little ashamed of the honesty, but honesty it was, and Levi gawked at him like it was slowly dawning on him in turn the brazen truth of Cain’s words, all wrapped up in sensuality as they were.
Levi made him feel alive.
To feel that way was a deep and aching need, like a rebirth of hope that was cold and sharp.
“Are you trying to seduce me?” Levi teased in a whisper, with his little half-cocked smirk and hooded eyes. Cain threw back his head and laughed. Because yes, yes, for once, he was the one doing the charming, and he believed it had worked.
“I want you forever,” Cain promised, breathless, wrapping his arms about Levi’s shoulders.
Levi’s smirk softened. A heated look sparked in his eyes.
At his touch Cain arched like a cat, lashes lowering. “I want you forever as my friend, and my fighter, and my lover.”
There was a brisk silence, a tense pause.
“Only if you’ll have me forever,” Levi finally acquiesced, voice raw and ragged and full of surrender.
Ah, it seemed a worthy crusade now, but who could know if it would stand the test of time? Perhaps it wasn’t going to last forever, perhaps it was, but in that moment the warm feelings inside felt infinite. Nothing else—responsibilities, engagements, revenge—nothing else seemed as important as kissing Levi long and soft before he climbed down from the balcony and left for his lodgings on the Rue.
And the next afternoon, utterly unaware of the dreamy look on his face, Cain smiled faintly and pointed to the papers his uncle and guards laid out before him in his office. He really needed to stop daydreaming and get on with business. Did everyone around him wonder why he was so calm and content today, so moved to smiles and nods instead of insults? Did it strike them as odd?
